Now here we are—and it’s time to catch up with a variety of thoughts on economics and access. Most items cited come from 2016 and 2015. As usual, the groupings are somewhat arbitrary and items within a group are usually chronological.

Fifty HathiTrust member libraries have proposed to retain more than 16 million volumes for 25 years under the HathiTrust Shared Print Program. These volumes correspond to more than 4.8 million individual book titles held in the HathiTrust Digital Library (about 65% of all HathiTrust digital monographs). This is a significant step toward the primary goal of the program: to ensure that print copies of all HathiTrust digital holdings remain available to scholars for many years to come. The Shared Print Program is a core program of HathiTrust, supported by and benefiting all of the more than 120 HathiTrust members

On June 23, 2017, the American Chemical Society (ACS) filed suit in the United States District Court Eastern District of Virginia against unnamed confederates of Sci-Hub, a self-proclaimed web pirate organization that steals and then illegally reproduces and disseminates copyrighted scientific research articles on the internet. The suit asserts infringement of the professional Society’s copyrights, as well as counterfeiting and infringement of its trademarks.

Imagine the Internet without the Web. Imagine that there is no Google or similar search engine. Imagine that the cutting edge Internet applications are e-mail, LISTSERV, FTP, and Telnet (terminal sessions). Imagine that the Internet is made up of a number of different networks, and that the connections between them are not always transparent. Imagine that no established publisher has even experimented with an e-journal. Imagine that the latest mid-range PC has a 6 MHz 16/32-bit 80386SX processor, a 30 MB hard drive, and 2 MB of RAM and costs about $3,900.

That was the situation in June 1989 when I launched PACS-L, a LISTSERV mailing list, after distributing some photocopied handouts at the ALA Annual meeting. PACS-L was one of the first library-oriented mailing lists, and it was unusual in that it had a broad subject focus (public-access computer systems in libraries). PACS-L was sponsored by the University of Houston Libraries. Walt Crawford and Roy Tennant have shared their thoughts about PACS-L in "Talking About Public Access: PACS-L's First Decade" and "Remembering PACS-L."

In August 1989, I launched and began editing The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, one of the first e-journals on the Internet and the first open access journal in the field of library and information science. It was freely available, allowed authors to retain their copyrights, and had special copyright provisions for noncommercial use. It was published by the University of Houston Libraries. Issues were announced via e-mail, and articles were distributed as ASCII files from a LISTSERV. You can find a history of the journal and links to articles and reviews about it in "The Public-Access Computer Systems Review."

In 2005, I established Digital Scholarship, and I began to write and publish open access works under Creative Commons licenses. Since then, Digital Scholarship has published PDF books, inexpensive paperback books, XHTML bibliographies, weblogs, Twitter streams, and other works.

Back in 1989, I never thought that a wacky idea and a few handouts would lead to 28 years of digital publishing projects.

For the first time in years, publisher revenue for all print formats saw growth: hardback books grew 2.2%, children’s board books grew 7.7% and paperback/mass market grew 4.1% compared to 2015 revenues. The news for digital books was mixed, as downloaded audio continued its double-digit growth from 2015, up 25.8% for 2016 vs 2015 and eBooks continued their decline, down 15.6%.

This article is a first-hand account of the author’s work identifying and listing predatory publishers from 2012 to 2017. Predatory publishers use the gold (author pays) open access model and aim to generate as much revenue as possible, often foregoing a proper peer review. The paper details how predatory publishers came to exist and shows how they were largely enabled and condoned by the open-access social movement, the scholarly publishing industry, and academic librarians. The author describes tactics predatory publishers used to attempt to be removed from his lists, details the damage predatory journals cause to science, and comments on the future of scholarly publishing.

This article presents the results of a study of academic e-books that compared the metadata and search results from major academic e-book platforms. The authors collected data and performed a series of test searches designed to produce the same result regardless of platform. Testing, however, revealed metadata-related errors and significant variation in search results that could impact the user experience. This article describes how other libraries could perform this type of testing and how this information could be used to inform the selection of e-books that are available on multiple platforms.

Graduate students across disciplines feel pressure to publish their scholarship, but they are often unsure how to go about it, partly due to a lack of explicit training in this area. This article discusses the collaborative development of a semester-long Publishing Academy, designed to promote knowledge of scholarly publishing and increase the library’s impact within the graduate student community. Demonstrating how librarians can draw on their unique skills to build a niche service addressing unmet needs on campus, the project also puts into practice a broader conception of scholarly publishing literacy, which can be linked to the Association of College and Research Libraries Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.

This new version retains much of the structure of the previous one, and it still includes the ethnographic user profiles showing how six scholars do research with print and digital monographs. It also includes minor changes throughout addressing both specific and general questions we received and clarifying many points. We have gone from twelve to thirteen principles for the reimagined monograph. Most significantly, we have added as an appendix a new landscape review of related projects, which helps to situate our work on this project amongst a number of other important initiatives.

Biology researchers are able to post preprints and working papers on BioRN, share ideas and other early stage research, and collaborate. It allows users to quickly upload and read abstracts and full-text papers, free of charge. A preprint is the author’s own write-up of research results and analysis that has not been peer-reviewed or had any value added to it by a publisher (such as formatting, copy-editing, technical enhancements). A preprint server, or working paper repository as they are also known, allows users to share these documents.

Therefore, ICMJE will require the following as conditions of consideration for publication of a clinical trial report in our member journals:

As of July 1, 2018 manuscripts submitted to ICMJE journals that report the results of clinical trials must contain a data sharing statement as described below.

Clinical trials that begin enrolling participants on or after January 1, 2019 must include a data sharing plan in the trial’s registration. The ICMJE's policy regarding trial registration is explained at www.icmje.org/recommendations/browse/publishing-and-editorial-issues/clinical-trial-registration.html. If the data sharing plan changes after registration this should be reflected in the statement submitted and published with the manuscript, and updated in the registry record.

Even though Sci-Hub is billed as providing access to paywalled content, there appear to be thousands of open access articles in the host database. Sci-Hub provided usage of their services from 2015 to Science news writer John Bohannon with the full data set. Reviewing just the data from December 2015, I found that over 200 users accessed PLOS ONE content, over 450 users accessed Hindawi content, and a whopping 2,145 users accessed BioMed Central content.

Planned for this fall, DPLA will be lending ebooks in what it hopes is a streamlined, non-proprietary and vendorless platform.

While ebook lending has grown fast among US public libraries, the process is not always seamless. Book discovery, borrowing, and consumption must happen within the provide'’s app or website. DPLA wants to create a process that isn’t as specific, and one that works with a broader range of content producers for better access to ebooks.

Analyzing their [Altmetric's] Top 100 articles for 2016 (data available here), 70% of the Top 100 articles were published behind paywalls. Given the preponderance of paywalled journals, it may be tempting to interpret a 30% rate of non-paywalled articles in the data as an indication that OA journals are punching above their weight, as they comprise only 18% of papers currently, according the best available estimate. Drilling into the data, however, tells a different story. Fully 1/3 of the articles in the Top 100 categorized by Altmetric as OA come from Gold OA journals from for-profit publishers (mainly Elsevier and SpringerNature), which suggests that for-profit publishers’ promotional practices may benefit the prominence of the content they publish.

A total of 905,687 articles were published with the CC BY license in open access-only journals by members of OASPA during the period shown above [2000-2016], with 189,529 of those being published in 2016.

This briefing paper aims to provide a historical perspective that can inform the debates about what the future of academic publishing should look like We argue that current policy regarding open access publishing, and many of the other proposals for the reform of academic publishing, have been too focused on the opportunities and financial challenges of the most recent changes in digital communications technologies and have given undue weight to commercial concerns.

Featured Digital Scholarship Publications

DigitalKoans Overview

DigitalKoans provides news and commentary on digital copyright, digital curation, digital repository, open access, research data management, scholarly communication, and other digital information issues. From April 2005 through March 2016, DigitalKoans had over 13.4 million visitors, over 60.5 million file requests, and over 45.3 million page views. Excluding spiders, there were over 8 million visitors and over 19.8 million page views. It is available via e-mail, RSS feed, and Twitter.